William Walton - Film Music Vol. 1 (Neville Marriner)

Information

Composer: William Walton

• Hamlet, A Shakespeare Scenario
• As You Like It, A Poem for Orchestra after Shakespeare

John Gielgud, narrator

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields

Neville Marriner, conductor

Date: 1989

Label: Chandos

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Review

Where Walton's scores for Henry V and Richard III have had extensive recordings, the one he did for Hamlet, the second of the three Shakespeare films directed by Olivier, has been rather left on one side, with the magnificent ''Funeral March'' and the 'poem for orchestra', ''Hamlet and Ophelia'', the only major items to be recorded commercially. Here, thanks to the work of Christopher Palmer, a full suite of nearly 40 minutes has been assembled at last, to fill the gap. It is true that very soon after the film appeared in 1948, EMI issued a set of three 78rpm records with recordings from the Hamlet soundtrack, but one of the six sides, the gravedigger's scene, was of speech only (Olivier and Harcourt Williams) and two more—the ''To be or not to be'' soliloquy and Hamlet's instructions to the players—had very little music indeed. That soundtrack recording reappeared several times on LP in coupling with Walton's own recording of the Henry V music.

Nowadays, of course, the film itself is readily available on video, but Marriner's splendid recording of the score with the Academy allows one at last to appreciate the mastery of Walton's orchestration, his uncanny evocation of atmosphere. It is true that some of the tracks—''The Ghost'' for example—are musically little more than atmosphere-making, but how telling that is with timpani and bass-drum in insistent crescendo at the start and bogey-bogey chromatics making the flesh creep after that. The Prelude introduces us to the ''Funeral March'', by far the most memorable inspiration. Indeed Muir Mathieson's concert version of the march with its extended recapitulation uses material from that prelude. Marriner's reading of the ''Funeral March'', both in the Prelude and at the end, is far slower than Mathieson's on the film soundtrack.

The play scene has pseudo-Elizabethan music of the kind that Walton used so memorably in Henry V, and had already begun to use in the As You Like It score of 1936. Much of the rest relies on windingly chromatic contrapuntal writing, including the longest sequence, ''Hamlet and Ophelia'', which brings a sustained string passage rather like the Henry V interludes only more extended. It ends with the oboe playing Ophelia's melancholy theme, which is later used over watery vibraphone for her death scene. That is the material that Walton used for the concert-piece called Hamlet and Ophelia, first recorded by Sir Charles Groves and the RPO for EMI ((LP) EL270118-1, 2/85). Crowning the new recording is Sir John Gielgud in the two soliloquies, ''O that this too too solid flesh'' as well as ''To be or not to be''; in his eighties still a uniquely revealing Hamlet, far more satisfying than Olivier was in his idiosyncratic versions for the film.

In the As You Like It Suite, which comes as a valuable fill-up, the Academy's colourful performance is again crowned by the work of a soloist, Catherine Bott singing Walton's leisurely version of ''Under the greenwood tree'' with a golden brightness to outshine some of her recordings of early music. This suite is closer than the labelling may suggest to the one which Carl Davis recorded for EMI with the LPO and Choir ((CD) CDC7 47944-2, 10/87). What the Davis record—and Stewart Craggs's splendid thematic catalogue (OUP)—call ''The Waterfall Scene'', here confusingly becomes ''Moonlight''. Marriner has the song as a substantial extra, while Davis's extras in a suite of roughly the same length are all fragments, ''Wrestling Scene'', ''Sunrise'', ''Snake Scene'' and ''Hymn''. Consistently Marriner is the brisker and brighter in his performances, but what one marvels at in both is how skilled Walton was even in 1936 at getting instantly atmospheric results, far subtler than most Hollywood composers. One notes here already Walton's favourite device of using oboe and cor anglais together to make his Elizabethan pastiches sound more rustic.

Marriner and the Academy draw out all the romantic warmth of both scores, and the sound is richly atmospheric to match, with a sharper focus and a keener sense of presence than on some recordings from this source. The Hamlet music may not match Henry V in sustained invention, but I certainly look forward to more issues in Chandos's splendid Walton series devoted to the results of Christopher Palmer's researches.

— Edward Greenfield

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William Walton (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre. Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work is not large. His most popular compositions continue to be frequently performed in the 21st century, and by 2010 almost all his works had been released on CD.

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Neville Marriner (1924–2016) was an English violinist and conductor. Trained at the Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatory, he performed with leading ensembles such as the Philharmonia and London Symphony before turning fully to conducting. Marriner was renowned for his extensive recording career and leadership of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, which he founded in 1958 and directed for more than five decades. He also led major international orchestras in Los Angeles, Minnesota and Stuttgart. He earned three Grammy Awards, notably for supervising the Amadeus (1984) soundtrack.

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